Video: Touring the Develop module

The Develop module is the heart of Lightroom. Its where you process your photos to match your vision. Every change that you make in the Develop module is non-destructive of the original image. It simply kept it's instructions as metadata which makes the Develop module in Lightroom a great and a safe place to work on your photos. You may be wondering why I'm starting in the Library Panel in the movie that is about the interface and the mechanics of working in the Develop module. Well, that's because the develop workflow usually does start in the Library module, where you'll select a source of the files that you are going to access in the Develop module.

In Up and Running with Photoshop Lightroom 4, author Jan Kabili introduces the Adobe Photoshop Lightroom features for organizing, enhancing, and sharing digital photos and video clips. The course shows how to import photos and video clips from a camera and from a hard drive, explaining how Lightroom catalogs work along the way, and how to manage and organize photos and video clips with the Library module. The course also covers enhancing photos in the Develop module, including cropping, adjusting exposure, recovering details from highlights and shadows, sharpening and adding clarity, and correcting part of a photo, as well as enhancing video clips. The course concludes with a look at sharing photos: posting them on Facebook, creating photo books, exporting, and printing.

Touring the Develop module

The Develop module is the heart of Lightroom.Its where you process your photos to match your vision.Every change that you make in the Develop module is non-destructive of the original image.It simply kept it's instructions as metadata which makes the Develop module inLightroom a great and a safe place to work on your photos.You may be wondering why I'm starting in the Library Panel in the movie that isabout the interface and the mechanics of working in the Develop module.Well, that's because the develop workflow usually does start in the Library module, where you'll select a source of the files that you are going to accessin the Develop module.

That could be a collection, that could be all your photographs which you accessfrom the Catalog Panel or in many cases, it will be a folder of files on yourhard drive from here in the Folders panel.Once I've selected that folder, I'll click on Develop in the Module Picker tojump over to the Develop module.Right now, I have no photo selected because I haven't clicked on one of thosethumbnails back in the Library module.I did that on purpose because I wanted you to see that all the files in mySource folder are displayed down here in the film strip at the bottom ofthe Develop module.

This film strip is the mirror of the same film strip that we saw back inthe Library module.So, if I want to work on a photo, I'll just choose it from this film strip.Clicking on it here and it appears up here in the Image Window in the Develop module.By default when an image is open for processing here, it opens to largestmagnification at which it will fit in this window.If I want to view the image at 1:1 view, which is important when you're sharpening or working on noise reduction, as we'll do later in the course, then I can either just move into the image where my cursor changes to a Zoom tool and click onceand then drag inside the image to get to the portion of the image that I want to see or, I can use the Navigation buttons over here at the top of the Navigator panel on the left side of the Develop module.

I can click Fit, to fit the entire image in the window again or Fill, to fillthe window with the image or again, 1:1 to zoom in close to the image.I'm going to go back to the Fit view.Notice that the general layout of the Develop module looks a lot likethe Library module.In addition to the same film strip on the bottom and in the Image window in the middle, over on the left and right are columns of panels and there are a lot of panels.Notice that in the column on the left, there is the Collections panel. This is the same Collections panel that we saw back in the Library module. That's agood thing because it means that you can access photos that you've included in a collection in the Library module from here in the Develop module.

So for example, here is a Smart Collection that I made back in the Library panelin an earlier movie.If I click on that, I can see all the contents of that collection down here inthe film strip and I can select a thumbnail from there to work on.I'd like to go back to work on that image of the church in Lucerne, so I'm going toclick this Back Arrow in the bar at the top of the film strip to go back.Over in the column on the right, are the panels that you'd use to make your photo adjustments.The Histogram panel at the top of this column is a bar chart of the tonalvalues in the open image.

I suggest that you leave this Histogram panel open while you're working on a photo so that you can reference this chart and see the effect of the adjustments that you're making.Below that is the Toolbar that contains some tools you'll use as you'readjusting an image in the Develop module; including the Crop Overlay tool, a SpotRemoval tool and two powerful local adjustment tools, the Graduated Filter tooland the Adjustment Brush tool.We'll be looking at all of those tools later in the course.Those tools are for making local adjustments.But before you use those, you'll usually make global adjustments; adjustmentsthat affect the entire image.

The global adjustments that we'll be focusing on in this course are those in the Basic panel.I'm going to close the Histogram panel temporarily just so you can see more of theBasic panel and I'll also make the film strip shorter by moving over its top border and dragging down.So, there is the Basic panel. We'll be looking at all of the controls in this panel in detail.We'll also take a look at the Detail panel where I'll cover Sharpening and Noise Reduction.So, those are the primary adjustment controls that you'll use when you'regetting up and running with Lightroom 4.

Now, let's talk a bit about the mechanics of working on an image in the Develop module.I'm going to make some slight adjustments to this image by dragging some of these sliders.I'll tell you a lot more about all of these sliders later in the course, but I just want to make some brief adjustments.And if you're following along, it doesn't really matter exactly how you drag the sliders for now.What I wanted to show you is that if I change my mind about a slider I can set it back to its default by double-clicking its label.So, if want to set this Exposure slider back to where I started, I'll double-clickExposure and that doesn't affect any of the other sliders.

If I do want to put all the sliders back to where I stared when I first opened this image, I'll click the big Reset button here at the bottom at the column on the right.I'm going to undo by pressing Cmd+Z on my keyboard, that's Ctrl+Z on a PCkeyboard, to bring all those adjustments back because I want to show you how you can get a before and after view when you're working in the Develop module.One way to do that is to just press the Backslash key on your keyboard.And that gives me a before view and there's an after view.I can also see a comparison of both before and after views if I come down to the Toolbar which is this bar under the Image window and click the Before and After View icon.

And there are different arrangements of the before and after view that I can use as well.The icon to the left of the Before and After View icon is the Loupe View icon.I'll click that to see the entire image in the Image window again and that'sjust like the Loupe View in the Library module.Now, let's take a look at the History panel which is the powerful place that you can go to undo and redo changes that you've made in the Develop module.I'll expand the History panel by clicking on its Title bar and here you can see a complete history of all the adjustments that I've made to this image and I can go back to anyone of them.

And when I do, that changes the appearance of the image and the changes all the sliders over here in the panels on the right.I can go forward on time as well, clicking on another state higher up in this ladder.What's great about the History panel is that there is no limit on the number ofhistory states that it will keep track of and it will always be here even afterI close Lightroom and reopen it, whenever I open the same image to work on it.So, that's the tour of the layout of the Develop module and a quick look at someof the mechanics of working here.

Now, let's jump right in and learn how to make your photos look great in the Develop module.

Learn by watching, listening, and doing, Exercise files are the same files the author uses in the course, so you can download them and follow along Premium memberships include access to all exercise files in the library.

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Learn by watching, listening, and doing! Exercise files are the same files the author uses in the course, so you can download them and follow along. Exercise files are available with all Premium memberships.
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